furled into tight little yellow and red fists, and beyond them prince’s
feather, nasturtiums, a chinaberry tree, and a syringa bush all mixed
in with tomatoes (the kind that bear small fruit, like red marbles),
collards, mint, jimson weeds and white and yellow dog fennel. The Rev.
Zachariah Draper spent but little time on things like gardening. But
his congregation kept his house in good repair. It was the best in the
Negro section of Lower Habersham.
Woodie knocked. There was the sound of a tilted chair let down to the
floor, and then of a heavy foot, and Draper came into the doorless
hallway that ran through the middle of the house with the slinging
slouch that had always made Woodie think of an enormous, sore-footed
cat. He had been afraid of the preacher all his life.
“Good-morning,” he said, as simply as he could, but he knew his voice
had a stilted sound.
Draper straightened and fumbled with his collar, which was unbuttoned.
He buttoned it and made a pompous bow. “Howdy, suh? What can Ah do fer
yer?”
The boy had the miserable consciousness that he had been mistaken for a
white man. He was tall for his seventeen years, with a coffee-and-cream
coloured skin; the light shone from behind him; he and Draper had
not met for five years, and he wore the kind of clothes that in that
place only white men wore: a gray tweed suit, tan Oxford shoes and blue
socks, a clean white collar, a blue cravat and a sailor straw hat. He
was intensely conscious of them, but they were all he had.
“It--it’s jest Woodie Simmons, Brudder Zach,” he stammered, dropping
desperately into the vernacular in an attempt at conciliation. “Don’t
yer know me?”
Draper came nearer, and the morning sun shone on his boldly modelled,
lustful face until it gleamed like oiled black marble. His huge body
seemed to exude health and strength, along with a rank, unpleasant
odour of its own and the smell of snuff. He wore enormous carpet
slippers on his bare feet, blue overalls, a dirty white stiff shirt
without a cravat, and the greenish black frock coat which was his
inevitable badge of office. He tilted back his head, his lips curled
away from his snuff-chinked teeth and bluish gums, something lightened
in his live black eyes and he broke into a great whoop of laughter.
The volume and unexpectedness of it startled the boy. He shrank back as
if he had been pushed. His anger rose, but fear and grief made him weak.
“Li’l Woodie Simmons!” Draper roared. “Li’l’ pickaninny Woodie, dressed
up lak’ _dat_!” He drew an immense blue handkerchief with white polka
dots on it from the tails of his coat and wiped his eyes and blew his
nose, watching Woodie the while with a malignant shrewdness beneath
his feigned amusement. He enjoyed the boy’s discomfort and wanted to
prolong it. “Tell me, son, do de Yankee white man what’s payin’ fer yer
at dat school up North throw in dem clo’es?”
“He--he pays all my expenses. All the boys dress thisaway. And--and
everybody else in the town.”
“Do tell! Ah thought mebbe dey’d done made yer er perfesser or
somethin’. And now yer’s done gradyerwaited yerse’f, is yer gwine take
de colonel’s place down ter de bank, or be de chief er _po_lice, or
what?”
Woodie’s eyes filled with tears. He trembled like a colt in a
thunderstorm--he was leggy and sensitive and slender like a colt.
“Brother Zack,” he said timidly, “my father--died--last night.”
A swift change went over the preacher. His easy, bantering air
disappeared. He bent forward an intent grave face. Always and innately
dramatic, he listened in every line.
“There’s nobody but--but you to preach--at his funeral. Will you--will
you please do it?”
Draper gazed at the boy for a long moment. “Tampa Simmons daid!” he
said slowly. He pursed his lips and narrowed his eyes, nodding his head
to emphasize the words. “Tampa Simmons _daid_!”
He still seemed to be listening, but now to something inside himself.
His unseeing eyes were turned inward. A change went over his face and
illumined his eye. He regarded Woodie with stern dignity. The boy knew
the issue had been settled, but not how.
“Yer paw was er backslider an’ er Philly-stine. He turned his back on
’ligion. He fought me up an’ he fought me down, ever since de day Ah
first come ter de Ole Ship er Zion, fifteen years ago. Ah wrastled wid
um in de presence uv de Lawd, an’ he scandalized mah name.”
It was the deep, sure barytone that had won him half his battles. He
could turn it on like an organ stop whenever he needed it. It had a
strangely moving quality. Woodie felt it in the flesh of his back.
“But de Sperret says ter me: ‘Bury um from de Ole Ship an’ preach ter
his funeral.’ Ah feel de Sperret movin’ in mah heart, an’ dat what it
say: ‘Bury um from de Ole Ship an’ preach ter his funeral.’ Yer can
tell yer maw Ah’ll do it.”
Woodie told her two hours later, after he had bought food in the town,
made arrangements for the funeral to be held the next morning at nine
o’clock--the hour set by Draper--notified their friends, and jogged
the three miles back home on the old white mule that had gone down the
furrows ahead of his father ever since he could remember.
“Praise de name er Jesus!” she said gently in her soft voice. “Glory be
ter Gawd! Ah never thought he’d do it!”
She turned her face to the whitewashed wall where she lay on her bed
and began to cry quietly to herself, from relief. Before Woodie could
leave the room she had gone to sleep, for the first time in forty-eight
hours.
She was a soft, plump little woman, almost the same colour as her son,
full of kindness and forgivingness. She had had no part in the feud
between her husband and the preacher. She had always gone to church
at the Old Ship of Zion. When Draper became a part of it she had
accepted him without question. He preached only hate and fear: hate of
the unconverted, of the liberal-minded, of white people, and fear of,
almost equally, God and the devil, but she didn’t see that. She was
perplexed and frightened when her husband denounced him as unchristian
and withdrew his family from the church. That had been fifteen years
ago, when Woodie was a baby.
Other people had followed Tampa Simmons--who was a good deal of a
leader in his own right--but not for long. There was fascination in the
very boards of the Old Ship and a dread fascination in Draper. His gift
of torrential oratory was unlike anything the Piney Woods had known.
His congregation whispered that he “had a hand,” and shivered with
dreadful pleasure, seeing his power as half from Satan and half from
God, and wholly interesting. Their meagre lives would have been barren
of entertainment, their genuine religious fervour denied an outlet,
without Draper and the Old Ship. Everyone had drifted back but the
Simmonses.
Woodie’s mother had remained away solely from loyalty to his father.
As Woodie lingered, looking down at her, he realized with a pang that
at any time during the fifteen years she would have returned to the
Old Ship, if she could, as a carrier pigeon to its home. She had never
really understood how his father felt, nor why. Woodie had understood,
even five years ago--when he was too young to talk about it. He could
have talked about it now, and now it was too late.
He went into the other room. Pieces of dark cloth had been tacked up
at the windows to keep out the light. Two old women were bent together
beside the fireless hearth. He had always called them Aunt Caroline
and Aunt Miranda, but they were not related to him. He could barely
see them in the half dark, but the mound of his father’s body beneath
a sheet on the bed stood out clearly. Nothing could have lain so
still which had not once had life in it. The room smelled of medicine
and snuff and food, and somehow faintly of death. The old women were
talking in whispers and dipping snuff.
There was another woman in the lean-to kitchen, beside the stove, where
he had never seen anyone but his mother. She was cooking dinner:
collards, turnip greens with pork, and crackling bread. The strong
odours made him a little queasy. The woman was stout and black and
shone with perspiration. She had big, loose breasts and cheeks and
lips and shrewd, tolerant eyes. She wore the garbled remains of white
women’s clothes: shoes broken at the bulges, a black silk skirt that
had split on the creases, and a newly blackened waist still damp with
pokeberry dye. Her face looked strange to Woodie without its usual half
smile. Her name was Maria Knox, and her husband was a truck gardener.
He had known her all his life, but when they spoke to each other their
words were stiff and unnatural. He had played with her children almost
every day until he went away, but now it seemed that it wasn’t he who
had known them.
He was feeling more clearly and deeply than he had ever felt; the
impressions made upon him were going to last until he was an old man,
but because he kept seeing himself as if he were someone else, he
thought he wasn’t much affected, and was disappointed in himself. He
couldn’t help seeing the house as if it were a stage-set for a play
about inferior people, and the people in the house as if they had been
actors, and that seemed to him cruel and unworthy.
He went on out of doors and sat on a stump near the house, where his
father used to smoke his pipe in the evening. It came to him there
that _he_ was the head of the family now. Somehow he had to take the
place of the strong, resourceful man who was dead. He felt slight and
ignorant--incompetent. The flash and fragrance of the spring day seemed
inappropriate and unnatural. He held up his hand to shield his eyes.
The fresh yellow-jasmine-scented air was strange in his nostrils.
He stared off across the clearing. That, too, seemed like a scene in a
play, and yet no other spot of ground was so familiar. The climbing sun
lit as if they had been candles the red trumpet flowers that hung on a
twisted pine. There had always been a trumpet vine on that tree....
Something moved near the base of the tree. He looked more closely and
saw that it was a woman. She was waving her hand--beckoning. He got up
and walked across the clearing.
As he came nearer he recognized a spry, birdlike creature who played
the melodeon in the Old Ship. He remembered that she used to give him
tea cakes.
“Why, howdy, sis? Charity?” He held out his hand.
She took it and peered at him with nearsighted eyes from a kindly face
as wrinkled as a nanny-oak ball.
“Howdy, Woodie? Yer sho’ has growed lak’ er weed! De spittin’ image uv
yer maw! Ah called yer over hyeh ter keep from disturbin’ her. Ah--Ah
got somethin’ ter tell yer.”
Her eyes blinked rapidly; she put her head first on one side and then
on the other with quick little jerks and her fingers worked nervously
together.
“Dat low-down nigger, dat Zach Draper”--she looked around
uneasily--“when he preach ter yer paw’s funeral ter-morrer, he
gwine--gwine”--her voice shook--“_he gwine sen’ his soul ter hell!_”
Woodie stared in blank amazement. “He’s go’n’er do _what_?”
“_He gwine sen’ yer paw’s soul ter hell!_”
“But--but how can he? What’s _he_ got to do with it? Don’t everybody
know Pappy was a good man? Do you think anybody will believe him?”
“_Ev’ybody_ b’lieve um! Ain’t he de preacher? An’ ain’t yer paw laid
his ’ligion down? Fer fifteen years he ain’t gone ter church nowhar!”
“There warn’t anywheres else to go but the Old Ship.”
“That ain’t gwine make no diff’rence ter most folks. Dey’ll say Brudder
Zach’s got de right ter decide ’bout dat. He’s er powerful man when it
comes ter de ’splainments uv de Sperret!”
Woodie had the feel of things crumbling down inside of him. “I’ll--stop
him somehow!” he said in a choked voice; but he felt frightened and
confused. He looked into the troubled eyes of the little organist.
“What can I do, sis--Charity?” he faltered.
“Ah dunno, chile! Ah dunno! Ah’s knowed yer paw all mah life, and,
preacher or no preacher, Zach Draper ain’t fitten ter tote swill fer
um!”
“Can’t you--can’t you change him somehow? Can’t you talk him out of it?”
“Ah’s done tried ter! Ah’s talked ter um till he won’t listen ter me no
mo’.”
Woodie shook with sudden anger. “Did you tell him he’s
ornery--lowdown--mean?”
“Gawd A’mighty, boy, Ah dassent! Ah’m skeered uv um! Ev’ybody’s skeered
uv um!” She lowered her voice almost to a whisper: “Dey do say he’s got
er han’!”
Woodie shivered. You got a “hand” from a conjure doctor, and it gave
you supernatural power over your enemies. He had thought, off at
school, that he had come to regard such things as nonsense, but down
here a deep live current of terror ran through the people, and he found
himself tingling to it as he used to do.
Woodie stood for a long time beneath the swaying trumpet flowers,
thinking. There was one person who could stop Draper if she would. Miss
Jinny Pickens could stop any coloured man or woman in that county from
doing anything. His grandfather and grandmother had belonged to her,
and he had seen his father and mother turn to her in every emergency.
He went to her now as naturally as they would have done.
But first he told the three women what Charity had said, and made them
promise to help him keep it from his mother.
From the other side of the gentle tree-smothered valley that stretched
before it the house lifted itself with its old air of remote nobility,
but when he had walked up the long, winding driveway under the oaks and
hickory trees and sycamores, he saw that the paint had flaked from the
tall Corinthian columns--which no longer had the effect of propping
up the sky--and that the iron balcony behind them drooped like a
disillusioned mouth.
And at the rear, where all coloured people were supposed to enter and
his feet took him of their own accord, the arms of the tall fig tree
couldn’t hide the broken shutters at the windows, the gaps in the
railing of the upstairs porch, nor the rotting boards of the steps--the
air the old place had of dropping minutely into ruin, bit by bit.
The harsh smell of fig leaves in the sun came to him strongly, and he
took a sudden sharp breath. It brought back his father more vividly
than even the sight of his dead face had done. Tampa Simmons seemed to
be standing against the big three-fingered leaves, heavily listed to
the left on account of his lame leg, just as he had stood that day when
he had brought cream (and Woodie) to the back yard and Miss Jinny had
come out to talk with him.
“Miss Jinny, ma’am,” he had said, “Ah don’t want mah li’l’ boy ter
grow up ter be lak’ Ah is! Miss Jinny--look at me!” He had spread out
his work-twisted hands in the mellow sunshine of late afternoon and
looked at her earnestly, and Miss Jinny (and Woodie) had looked at him.
“Ah don’t know nothin’; Ah can’t read an’ Ah can’t write; Ah ain’t
got nothin’ an’ Ah ain’t never goin’ ter have. Ah’m jest er cawnfiel’
nigger--er li’l’ better’n er mule. Don’t yer expec’ that mebbe somehow
it might be fixed so’s mah li’l’ boy might be--diff’rent?”
Woodie heard again the grave, self-respecting bass and saw the deeply
furrowed, kindly face looking out at him with what had come to be to
the boy the wistfulness of their race.
Miss Jinny, too, had seen and heard, and felt, and in the end had
found a man in Boston--and Jerusalem seemed no farther from the Piney
Woods--to send Woodie away to school and give him such an opportunity
as had fallen to the lot of no other coloured child he had ever known.
Even his vacations were provided for: that the experiment might have a
thorough chance, he had spent them, until this year, with a prosperous
Negro family who had a summer place in Maine.
Behind the humble Simmons family always, as protection, somehow, from
any hardship too great to be borne, had stood the great rock of Miss
Jinny Pickens: impoverished, elderly, and alone, but a Pickens; knit
into the fibres of the state; indomitable by nature and affiliations.
Woodie felt her there. He stepped up and knocked at her door with
confidence.
The door was opened by a woman of his own race whom he did not know.
“_She_ ain’t hyeh!” she said, with inflections that suggested that only
the undesirable wouldn’t have known it. “She done gone ter Leestown,
ter see Miss Sadie Lee.”
The Lees were cousins of the Pickenses. He hadn’t thought of any of the
old names for a long time. He asked when Miss Jinny would return.
“Mebbe ter-morrer an’ mebbe not. Is you Tampa Simmons’ boy?”
When he said he was she told him what Draper meant to do at the
funeral. She told him with sympathy, but with a strange gusto. There
had been a trace of it even in the kindly Charity.
He had come through the woods. As he went back by the road and one
Negro after another stopped him to tell him the same thing in the
same way, the sick consciousness dawned within him of something which
he could not have expressed. The sympathy of these people was real
enough, but there was in it an excitation of horror that they craved; a
brushing near of occult and of awful things. They awaited his father’s
funeral in a state of delicious, morbid expectancy.
If Miss Jinny failed him!...
He got out the old white mule and started for Leestown.
When he returned the mule to the stable a round white moon was pouring
light steadily into the velvet darkness. Sore and stiff, he stumbled
into the kitchen, where a pallet had been fixed for him on the floor.
He had ridden the mule to Leestown and back--twenty-four miles. He had
had to ride slowly, because the old mule tired easily and had gone a
little lame. He would have made the trip by stage, but no stage went in
the afternoon. Both towns were off the railroad.
He had gone to Miss Sadie Lee’s house, and again Miss Jinny had been
away. Miss Sadie had taken her motoring. The best he had been able
to accomplish was to leave a note, to be delivered to Miss Jinny
immediately upon her return. He hadn’t dared wait for her. If she
wasn’t going to stop Zach Draper, he had to do it himself.
He couldn’t sleep. His mind ran all night, as uselessly as the arms of
an unconnected windmill. It showed him scores of unrelated pictures:
the faces of boys he knew off at school; the little white New England
church in the village there; Draper, laughing at him; a bend in the
creek where he used to swim; his father’s body; the corner of a
cornfield behind a snake fence covered with purple morning glories.
It repeated scraps of the day’s conversations. On and on and on.
It reverberated soundlessly with the voodooistic terror that ran
through the Negroes of the Piney Woods at the prospect of the morrow’s
sensation. Fear, like a hot wind, blew across it, searing and drying
his thoughts. He felt things older and bigger and more terrible than
he had realized threshing around him in the hot, humid Southern air....
Finally he got up and rummaged in a cupboard and slipped his father’s
old pistol into the pocket of his coat, where it hung over the back of
a chair. He had a plan now. It was as simple as Cain’s....
Toward morning he slept a little.
* * * * *
Woodie sat on the front pew in the Old Ship of Zion, between his mother
and Maria Knox. His mother was heavily swathed in borrowed black. Her
plump, innocent features, still swollen from weeping, looked purged and
peaceful beneath her veil. She alone was unaware of the air of tense
expectancy that bound the rest of the congregation together.
In front of them stood his father’s coffin, on two sawhorses banked
deep with cape jasmine, which had just begun to bloom; dead-white,
half-opened flowers set stiffly in stiff, glistening green leaves.
Their heavy odour lay like a blanket over the place in spite of the
open windows. A score of spring scents outside strove against it in
vain.
Behind him the church filled steadily. He could feel the waiting
people: row on close-packed row, all their faces turned one
way--tense--expectant--frightened. They were all very still. Somewhere
in the distance a man was calling hogs. The long-drawn notes of his
voice sounded like a horn. It died away, and the kind of silence that
belongs only to funerals fell upon the little church. Into it the clock
on the wall plumped nine twangy notes.
Charity spread her thin black fingers over the keys of the melodeon.
Draper erected his bulk in the chancel and began lining out the first
hymn: “Shall We Gather at the River?”
Woodie’s hour was on him, and Miss Jinny hadn’t come.
Things swam together and went black. He clutched the butt of the pistol
in his coat pocket with a cold, damp hand and stared at Draper. The man
seemed of superhuman size. He was like something the little church had
been built to hold. Woodie shook with fear.
His mother laid her hand on his arm. “Is yer all right, Son?”
“Yes’m,” he muttered thickly, “I’m all right.” But he scarcely heard
her and was barely aware that he had replied.
The first notes of the hymn came whining out of the old melodeon. He
rose with the rest, and the congregation sang. It passed over his mind
in a blur of sound.
Draper knelt beside the pulpit and prayed, and the people bowed their
heads to the roll of his voice. Woodie listened long enough to be sure
the prayer held no menace for the dead man; the rest of it became a
confused rumble in his ears.
Draper rose from his knees. Omitting the hymn between the prayer and
the sermon, he looked out over his people--gathered them in with
his eye. A hush fell upon them. The faint, lazy call of a distant
flycatcher pulsed its way clearly through their midst, and he spoke,
slowly.
“Brethren an’ sisters, de hymn done ax yer, shall we gather at de
river, de beautiful river dat flows by de throne uv Gawd? An’ _Ah’m_
a-axin’ yer”--he paused, spread out his arms in a slow gesture of
restrained power and let his voice fall upon a note that went through
the waiting people as a wind through leaves--“_Ah’m_ a-axin’ yer,
brethren an’ sisters, when yer gits ter de river, de beautiful river
dat flows by de throne uv Gawd, is yer gwine ter be fitten ter _git
on de boat_: de big boat dat’s a-waitin’ by de bank, wid de steam
a-shootin’ outer de chimbley an’ de paddles a-splashin’ in de water--de
big boat dat’s a-waitin’ dar ter take yer on down ter de throne itse’f?
_Is yer gwine ter be fitten?_”
A groan went over the people. A scarcely audible sigh of anticipation
came out of them. Draper caught it and fanned it. His voice began its
steady march toward its goal. Woodie’s mouth grew dry. His heart seemed
about to burst.
“It ain’t gwine do yer no good ter _sneak_ on ter de big boat ef yer
ain’t fitten, caise’ yer can’t fool de Lawd Jesus! Yer might fool de
cap’n er de boat, or de Angel Gabriel, but”--the creak of an automobile
brake came through the window--“yer can’t”--his outstretched hand sank
to his side--“fool----”
His big features stiffened with displeasure. He stood silent, staring
toward the door.
Woodie turned with the rest. His heart bounded like a toy balloon and
then crowded up into his throat and stuck there.
Miss Jinny Pickens was coming down the aisle.
But not the Miss Jinny Pickens he remembered: a frail, little old woman
with bent back and brown time spots on her wrinkled cheeks, who wore
shabby clothes and walked slowly, leaning on a cane.
A swift sense came back to him of the Miss Jinny whose foot had tapped
the floor as positively as a woodpecker’s beak against a tree; whose
back had been as straight as a child’s; whose movements had been marked
with crisp decisiveness; whose clothes had been magnificent.
Or had they only seemed so to the ragged little boy who had never owned
a pair of shoes or seen a train? Was it possible that she had been old
and frail and shabby then?
He couldn’t tell; but then and always she had been _Miss Jinny
Pickens_, and a member of the super-supreme court which in the last
analysis settled everything of importance in that countryside. No Negro
in the state had ever openly crossed one of them and lived out the day.
He looked with swift hope at Draper--and saw that things had changed.
Something inhered in Miss Jinny that stood for power, but Draper didn’t
see it. He waited there in haughty, calculating silence, watching
her progress down the aisle, through contemptuous, half-closed eyes,
unimpressed and unafraid. The consciousness that the issue lay solely
between him and Draper grew tight about Woodie’s heart. Miss Jinny
faded out for him almost before she had settled herself in the chair
that someone brought from the little room behind the melodeon.